A Personal Note

In July 2025, I fell five times in ten days.

The last fall was the worst. The next morning, I made sure I was in the doctor’s office. By the end of that visit, he told me he suspected a motor neuron disease. Before I left, he called other medical staff into the room to look at my tongue, which was shaking violently. I later learned the term for it: tongue fasciculations.

When I got back into my truck, I started researching what I might be facing.

I learned about the signs he had observed—fasciculations across my body, muscle deterioration in my hands, upper body weakness—and how they pointed toward ALS. What frightened me most was learning about bulbar onset, which begins by affecting speech, swallowing, and breathing. I had recently noticed my speech becoming nasal and had experienced a few episodes of almost choking while eating.

Over the next several months, I committed to my health in a way I never had before. I sought out natural healers, traveled to learn from them, and asked hard questions. Their message was consistent: the mental, emotional, and spiritual side of healing matters most.

One of the deepest areas I worked on was forgiveness. I accepted responsibility for my part in anything that needed to be released. I did the work honestly and thoroughly.

But I came to realize something important:

Forgiveness is powerful, but it is not the only step in releasing what the body may still be holding.

What I began to learn is that the body not only remembers events in the mind. It remembers them in tissue.

When we go through emotional strain, stress, or unresolved experiences, the body responds by tightening. Muscles contract. Connective tissue hardens. Over time, this creates what some call body armor—layer upon layer of physical tension, even when we believe we have moved on mentally.

The mind may forgive, but the body can still be holding.

Our nervous system does not always know the difference between a past and a present emotional experience. A memory, a thought, or even a feeling can trigger the same stress chemistry in the body as if the event were happening again. This creates ongoing tension that doesn’t simply disappear because we have decided to let something go.

In many ways, the body is like a record of our life experiences. Muscular tension, tight connective tissue, and chronic stress responses can be signs that emotions were never fully processed, only pushed aside so we could keep functioning.

This helped me understand something important:

Forgiveness releases the heart.

But honoring the past can help release the body.

Giving voice to what we have quietly carried, turning reflection into something constructive, and allowing those experiences to serve a purpose can reduce the internal tension we didn’t even realize we were still holding.

That understanding became part of my healing.

And it is a large part of why this story exists.

And over time, I began to understand something else clearly:

God did not want me to go to my grave with the ideas I had developed and shared over 20 years of teaching and coaching.

That realization is what gave birth to this story.

The Backbone of a School CEO: From Fragile to Firm, A story of courage and redemption. The model that shaped school leadership for a new era.

This is my way of honoring the past. Not by recounting events, and not by describing real people, but by turning years of observation, reflection, and experience into a fictional story that can serve future leaders.

As an introvert, I spent years watching closely, listening carefully, and reflecting deeply. I never had children of my own, which gave me long stretches of quiet time to think about education, character, leadership, and the subtle ways example shapes culture.

This story is the result of that quiet reflection.

Anyone who knew me in my first days of teaching will remember that I showed up with a character and leadership curriculum already in my binder, suggesting it might benefit students.

In many ways, I’m still doing the same thing.

Only now am I doing it through a story.

Good news:

Not long after I began this work—after I put words to paper and started honoring the past through this story—I noticed something unexpected.

I began to regain a small measure of strength in my upper body.

For weeks, I had needed help just to take off my shirt at the end of the day. Suddenly, I found that I could do it on my own again. Not easily. Not like I once could. But noticeably different.

I could feel the change.

It felt as though the tension I hadn’t realized I was carrying had started to loosen. As if giving voice to years of quiet reflection and allowing those ideas to finally move outward, it released something inward.

And it reinforced for me that honoring the past, expressing what we have carried, and stepping into the work we feel called to do can affect us in ways we do not yet understand.

Note: There is more to this journey and a deeper meaning behind how this project has contributed to my healing. I plan to add more to this page over time to share that more fully.

On a separate note, I’d love your feedback on another project. Use the button below to help. Thank you.